Happy New Year
We hope you had an enjoyable Christmas and wish you a Healthy and Happy 2020. Yes, its the start of the third decade of the third millennium - MMXX2019 has been a busy year here at The Reeves Project and fortunately one without any technical hiccups. During the year we've collectively added just over 1150 new pages, that's 50 shy of the total added in the previous year. Of those new pages, 450 have a page name starting with the letter "R" and probably represent a new R*v*(s) ancestor being added. And many hundreds of existing person pages will have been updated with new information during the past year, so its always worth rechecking TRP pages you've consulted previously.
We've welcomed 46 new users to our community during the past twelve months and we are always pleased to see when they make their first contributions to the wiki. Whist we're grateful for each and every new page added, it remains the case that the vast amount of new and updated content comes from a very small number of contributors. As I've frequently mused in the past, just think how much faster TRP would grow if each of our community members (and yes that does include you) added just one new page each month. If they did, by the end of March we'd have added as many new pages as we did in the whole of 2019 - what a thought.
The Reeves DNA Project over at FtDNA continues to flourish; the most recent quarterly summary of activity there is included below.
Wiki Stats - End December 2019
The total number of pages in the Wiki (as at 1 January 2020) now stands at 9550 (previously 9457, 9405, 9328) an increase of 93 pages during the month. Of the total, 1795 pages (was 1794, 1781, 1760) begin with a number and are most probably a date related gleaning. We currently have 4089 wiki pages categorised as "People", of which 3614 begin with the letter "R".Community members should log in to see more.
TRP Users
We ended December 2019 with 404 user accounts registered in TRP, an decrease of three. We actually added three new user accounts and removed six accounts which had never been activated by the requesting user. We had four user successfully activated their accounts during the past month. We welcome to our community Kate, Frances, Casey and Heather.Whether you joined TRP recently or a while ago, if you have yet to do so, please set a meaningful name for yourself as described in First Steps - Part 1. It isn't difficult and only takes a couple of minutes to do.
If you have already started the enrolment process and are having issues, please do let us know. Please contact New User Admin by sending an email to TRP123 (at) TheReevesProject (dot) org if you're stuck and need help. If you are not yet a member and would like to contribute to our community, please complete our Join Us form to start the membership enrolment process.
TheReevesProject123 - Our Companion Google Site
Talking of hiccups, I always hate to tempt fate, but it’s been a while since we’ve used the monthly news to remind everybody of our companion Google Site. We occasionally use these news pages within TRP to convey information about any minor issues with The Reeves Project or about planned outages. We aim to update the latest news within the first day or two of each month, so please do remember to review the the latest news page on a regular basis. We have no planned outages at present, but the unexpected does occasionally happen.To state the obvious, we can't use TRP itself to let you know what's going on (assuming we know ourselves), should we experience an unexpected outage. So in addition to our home page https://thereevesproject.org/data/ you should ensure you also have a browser bookmark for https://sites.google.com/site/thereevesproject123/home, our companion Google Site, just in case of emergencies. You'll find further details on page wiki page TRP - Is It Down?.
Reeves DNA Project Update
The fourth quarter of 2019 has been much busier than the previous couple of quarters. At the end of December the project has 346 member, an increase of eleven during the quarter.In October we welcomed Kate (Kathleen, who manages a kit on behalf of her father), Steve and Al. November was a little quieter, with John and Aurla joining us. Thus far in December we've seen five new members join us with two further requests being progressed as the month closes. We welcomed Ron, Heather, Marilyn, Mark, Kevin and Sue (who manages a kit on behalf of her mother) during December.
During the past quarter we've received the results for five Y-DNA Donor members of the project and four matched with pre-existing groups.
Kit 451129 for TB ungrouped
Kit 905377 for JR added to DNA Group 06A
Kit 917412 for AR added to DNA Group 08
Kit 917751 for JR added to DNA Group 08
Kit 918559 for RR added to DNA Group 08We hope these individuals or their representatives will make contact and allow us to identify them within TRP. We've seen no new Family Finder results and no new mt-DNA results for Reeves DNA Project members during the past quarter.As we end 2019, the project has 216 members who have taken some level of Y-DNA test and 181 of these tests are of a Y-37 or higher resolution. The Y-37 test is now considered the entry level Y-DNA test within this project to allow matching to be undertaken with reasonable certainty. These 216 members are currently organised into 19 active groups of matching results, along with a large pool of presently unmatched results.1 Our largest group, DNA Group 03 has 38 members and the smallest just one, following the withdrawal from FtDNA of their match partner's results.
Anniversary Reprise
Over the past year we’ve been looking back fifteen years to 2004 and the very early days of the Reeves DNA Project .. ..Barry Reeves created a handful of web page for the project back in the middle of February 2004 and in April 2004 the first set of Y-DNA results was posted to the Project's then new website. It was July 2004 before the first matching pair of Y-DNA results within our project was announced. This became DNA Group 01. We had to wait until mid December 2004 for the second matching pair of results DNA Group 02.
Over the intervening 15 years the number members of the Reeves DNA Project has grown to 346 and the total number of Y-DNA tests taken with FtDNA is probably in excess of 700,000. (See Footnote 2 ). Unlike many of the subsequent groups of matches formed within our Project, these first two groups still each have just two members. What wasn’t evident then but is clearer now, as the overall database at FtDNA has grown, is that both these pairings also have a strong affinity with results sharing other surnames.
If you’re interested to see how the Reeves DNA Project has grown over the past fifteen years, then please take a look at page DNA_Project_News where the key events are listed.
If you missed last quarter's summary the DNA Project Update for 3q2019 is available here.
1
Whilst the project shows 20 numeric groups, following the merger of two groups in October 2016, Group 17 is now permanently retired.
2
As of June 2019 The DNA Geek’s blog notes “FTDNA reports only about 716,000 yDNA records and 336,000 mtDNA records in their database”, but note this is based on estimated numbers and not on numbers reported by FtDNA themselves. https://thednageek.com/genealogical-database-growth-slows/#comment-27974